Autism and Christianity: A Difficult Marriage

 

PIN THIS, PLEASE - Autism and Christianity

 

Can autistic people be Christians? It’s a fair question, given that a disproportionate number of autistics are homosexual, trans, and/or either irreligious or into witchcraft or New Age spirituality. I’m not going to get into my theories as to why that may be. Beyond stating that the brain of an autistic is wired differently – some more differently than others – compared to that of a neurotypical, even the experts don’t know.

As far as whether an autistic person can be a Christian, well, here I am.

“But, isn’t autism demonic??”

*SIGH.* I suppose if you’re convinced that the common cold, Down’s syndrome, and being born with two differently colored eyes is demonic, then I won’t be able to convince you otherwise regarding autism.

For the rest of you who can think rationally, no, autism is not demonic. Nor is it a mental illness, though it easily leads to various mental illnesses, especially depression, anxiety, and OCD.

Why would anyone think autism comes from the satan?

Because they don’t understand the condition. They don’t understand that their baby or toddler is banging their head against the wall because they’re overwhelmed with stimulation – the bright lights, the non-stop talking and music, the disgusting tastes and textures being forced down their throats – and so they have to do something to release the stress build-up. Or to whack their neurological system back into balance.

People don’t understand that the staring all day at a ceiling fan or spinning plate or flushing toilet isn’t a sign of mental deficiency or demonic possession or the lack of desire to connect with other people, but a sign of fascination with the motion, or the need for more brain stimulation, or the need to escape from the other environmental stimulations.

People don’t understand that the child’s inability to speak in fluent sentences by age two like little Johnny next door can, is likely because their brain is developing more slowly than average. And most autistics who never are able to speak are able to figure out how to communicate in some way, at some point in their childhood – even if the way is difficult for their parents to understand.

Christians, especially those of the charismatic/Pentecostal/Full Gospel ilk, are notorious for demonizing phenomenon which they don’t understand. Praying for “deliverance” for someone whose brain developed differently in utero than the brains of most other people is both tragic and dumb.

It also does nothing to bring the autistic person closer to Christ. It will have the opposite effect, in fact.

“But so and so prayed for their kid and the autism went away!”

Autism isn’t a disease. It’s not something that requires healing. If a parent prays for a child who’s been diagnosed with autism and suddenly the child’s behavior becomes that of a neurotypical child, they probably had something else going on that was causing them to engage in disconcerting self-stimulation activities.

Or, while the parents were praying, they set up a structured day chock-full of activities for the child. Having interesting and stimulating things to do all day, and having a structure that made them feel safer because they no longer had to struggle against an executive function that was broken, they no longer felt as strong a need to try to regulate their nervous systems by head-banging, hand-flapping, or incessant rocking.

That stimming that sends parents running to their pediatricians in a panic in the first place? Yeah, it’s essential for us. If we are experiencing the slightest bit of stress or the least bit of boredom, our neurological systems get out of balance. The rocking, swaying on feet, humming, skin-picking, hair-sucking or twirling, hand-flapping, head-banging, foot or finger tapping, all of those stims somehow, for some reason, help our brains feel more together.

Let’s cut to the chase even further: the stimming helps us feel not crazy. Or, in many cases, helps us to find words or dig for creative ideas a lot more easily than if we just sit or stand still.

Those actions are not symptoms of demon possession or mental illness.

So if you’re wondering what the Bible says about autism, it says as much about it as it does about ADHD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Tourette’s syndrome.

Nothing.

EXCEPT.

Yeshua’s command to love one’s neighbor included everyone, regardless of brain function.

Now, before I dive into my personal experience as an autistic Christian, I think it’s pertinent to address a concept that has popped up in this age of ableism.

That is, disability theology.

Disability theology in a nutshell.

There are a lot of definitions around this phrase. Basically, it has to do with the question, “How does God see disabled people?” Closely associated with that is the idea that if a person is deaf, blind, in a wheelchair, has Down’s syndrome, or – yes – is autistic, they have a problem and need to be prayed for. And if they get prayed for and still have the problem, they must be in sin. Or not have enough faith.

It’s the same as often happens when a church member develops a terminal disease or chronic ailment. Only in the case of disability, the person is in this state for their entire life, or most of their life, or at least decades of their life.

And in some segments of Christianity, inclusion in the church is a foreign concept, and would-be disabled worshippers are sidelined and marginalized.

Because they are not “healed” or “whole.”

It’s sad that disability theology is even a thing, because the people of God are supposed to accept others for who they are, and understand that our Father has them on a particular journey for a particular reason. We aren’t supposed to be getting up on our thrones of judgment and pride and wondering why on earth everyone else can’t be as perfect as we obviously are.

Okay, tongue back out of cheek. Let me talk about a few issues I have faced as an autistic Christian.

Sensory sensitivities in church.

One day, I felt God calling me to join the church choir. Not too many weeks after, I was having to put earplugs in my ear before every singing time. It was a church that played modern music with modern instruments… and that had speakers behind the choir risers.

It was already too loud (for me) to be in the front row of the sanctuary when the band was playing.

The lights didn’t bother me so much, but I know that’s another issue many autistic people have to deal with when out in public. But the women’s perfume? The men’s cologne? Some days, I couldn’t leave the building fast enough so I could take a deep breath of the nitrogen oxide-infused outside air. Seriously. You can complain about air pollution from cars all you want, but give me Dallas air during a summer rush hour over artificial body scents any day.

Then, there were the communication challenges in church.

While I attended the particular Christian fellowship where I joined the choir, I also participated in that place’s singles group. One of the most steadfast members of not only that group, but the church fellowship as a whole, was a guy around the age of sixty named Freddie. Until I began writing this article, I had considered him to be a simpleton. Mildly mentally deficient, you might say. He worked a blue collar job – car mechanic, if memory serves – and had weathered skin, a shy smile, wrinkles around eyes that never quite met yours, and a relatively short stature. He was quiet, and when standing in a small circle where others were conversing, his single contribution would be, “I’m just glad I’m saved.” (Hear that with a deep Texas drawl.)

But after years of not thinking about the man, Freddie came into my mind just as I was writing the heading about communication. And I realized: he wasn’t a simpleton.

He was autistic.

And like most autistic people who are verbal, he had a standard thing he’d memorized so he could properly fit in socially.

That’s less of a problem for me, because I also have ADHD, which makes me a kind of motor mouth at times. But when in large groups, I become a wallflower, and if I haven’t thought ahead of time of questions to ask other people or topics to bring up, my brain gets stuck.

And even when it’s not stuck, it sometimes takes a few tries to get out exactly what I want to say. And when I say, “exact,” I mean, “sort of, almost, close enough.”

I may have forgotten about Freddie, but I will never, ever forget the singles Sunday school class we were having one day when the guy who’d been leading it for several years turned to me and said, “Emily, when I first met you I thought you were a dingbat.”

He’d been going around the room, talking about how he’d gotten to know and love each of us. While I appreciated his past tense of the comment, it felt like a slap in the face.

I wouldn’t know I was autistic for another twenty-some-odd years, and I had no idea that I came off like an idiot when I was attempting to converse with other people.

I didn’t realize I would get on a topic I enjoyed and harp on it in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way, continuing to talk long after everyone around me had lost interest in what I was saying.

So if you attend a Christian fellowship and have someone in the congregation who struggles with proper verbal expression, do me and them a favor and give them a break. And a lot of patience. Because it is often the diversity of communication that creates a problem around autism and finding belonging in church.

But the most intense of my neurodivergence and struggles with my faith have occurred outside the walls of a sanctioned worship building.

 

Autism and religious anxiety.

If you take nothing else away from this post, I want you to learn this about autistic people: most of us have a serious problem with rigid thinking. We read something that connects with us at a deep level, and even if it’s completely wrong, or doesn’t fit us later in our lives, we latch onto it like a piranha to its prey and refuse to let it go.

Therefore, autistics who are raised in a religion generally have one of two responses to what they learn.

They believe everything they’re taught until it hurts.

Or.

None of it makes any sense and they walk away from it as soon as they can.

I was the former.

And I was raised Catholic.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Catholic church’s greatest talent was making you feel guilty. Not that evangelical Protestant churches never do that, but the Catholic church has had centuries of practice. It’s very good – or used to be before it took a political left turn – at making its members feel guilty.

For not going to confession.

For not praying the rosary.

For not believing Mary is the Mother of God.

For not going to church every Sunday.

For eating before taking the Eucharist.

I could go on and on, but you get my drift.

The Holy Spirit protected me from believing some of the very wrong doctrines the denomination teaches, but I still lived under the fear that if I didn’t toe the line, God’s judgment would befall me.

Leaving Catholicism and joining a charismatic evangelical church in my mid-twenties only slightly alleviated the problem. Because in that new place of worship, you weren’t a real Christian unless you went to all three services during the week. You were “less than” if you didn’t do some sort of volunteer work for the church – even if you were highly sensitive and therefore suffered from constant anxiety and could barely handle your day job. You were supposed to pray for fifteen, thirty, sixty minutes every day – depending on who you asked – and have a morning Bible devotional before you left for work. If you were married, you were expected to have a passel of kids.

You couldn’t say negative things – however true they might be – without someone scolding you for making a “bad confession,” and you were an infidel if you didn’t tithe.

Those who gave more than ten percent to the building/leaders/organization were favorites.

One huge thing that came from both denominations I experienced was that if you had a talent or gift, God had given it to you to glorify Him, so you’d better use it that way, or else!

That’s where much of my religious anxiety landed in the years after the Lord led my husband and I to walk away from the institutional church. If I wasn’t part of a “local body,” how could I serve?

Wait! I know – start a YouTube channel! Except that’s not nearly as easy as it looks. Plus much of the lifestyle my family has chosen (namely, living in a very small house) makes creating videos difficult.

Okay then, I can write novels and teach through stories! That worked for a while, but the longer I did it, the more it felt like the wrong thing to do.

Maybe I should just focus on the simple homesteading life, I thought. But when I tried to grow a garden, I discovered that disease runs rampant in this part of the country, making it an exercise in frustration.

During the past decade, I’ve gone weeks being angry at God. The anger came from the guilt, guilt that I wasn’t doing enough. Could never do enough due to the choices I’d made.

My thinking around the issue was more rigid than granite, and it took many trials and many meltdowns and many years before I found out that God.

Did not.

Create me.

To do.

He created me to be.

To experience. To love. To enjoy His blessings.

Yes, a part of those blessings come from the things I do, and I certainly am the last person on Earth who would advise any Christian to sit around eating snacks and watching Netflix while praying for God to supernaturally pay the light bill.

But instead of following Him on a daily basis, I was running after what I thought – or what other people were telling me – I should be doing to bless the world with my time, skills, and talents.

But there’s an even greater facet to autism and spirituality that has promoted religious anxiety.

Autistic people are inherently self-centered.

Let me explain.

Autism presents differently in every single one of us with the condition. But the one thing we all have in common is that we live mostly inside of our own heads.

Fifty percent of diagnosed autistic people are unable to empathize with others on an emotional level. On an intellectual level, maybe. But not emotional.

Those of us who can feel empathy nevertheless struggle to understand why our way of thinking might be wrong and someone else’s might be right. We struggle to see other people’s perspectives, struggle to understand why other people don’t understand us.

Because of the rigid thinking, we believe that our logic is the right logic.

And so we tend to be critical and judgmental and not realize that our critiques and judgments are hurting other people. We tend to make decisions to serve our own needs.

We’re self-centered.

Christians aren’t supposed to be self-centered. If I really have the Spirit of God living inside of me, I should automatically be the opposite.

Yet, I have to make a conscious effort to put others’ needs and desires before mine. I have to work to see a situation from someone else’s perspective. And I mean, work hard.

Especially if that perspective is the opposite of mine.

Throughout my thirteen-year teaching career, I felt guilty that I could never feel nurturing toward my students. I sometimes feel guilty that I couldn’t be the epitome of the nurturing mother for my son when he was younger.

Because, through no fault of my own, I live in my head.

I have to make the choice to show affection, care, love. Such things simply don’t come naturally to me. Or, probably, to most autistics.

This is why I say that autism and Christianity makes for a difficult marriage. But I believe with all of my heart that autism and faith is a match worth fighting for.

I’m not sure where I’d be today without God’s grace.

(For more inspiring content like this, you can follow this blog if you have a Google account, bookmark this blog, follow my blog on Goodreads, and/or check out the books in the sidebar.) 

Writer’s Demand Avoidance; Or, Run Your Own Race

I recently discovered yet another psychiatric disorder. I call it “Writer’s Demand Avoidance,” the primary symptom of which is being unable to compose the usual type of writing which one is accustomed to, for a period of at least fourteen consecutive days. Upon trying to force oneself to work on a piece of writing, anger, anxiety, and writer’s block ensue, leading to greater frustration and feelings of Author Inadequacy.

The primary cause of this distressful disorder?

Deciding on a minimum daily word count, which minimum exceeds the prior minimum by at least 800 words and leads to resentment toward other daily tasks and hobbies because the increase word count also means decreased time available for non-writing activities.

I’m being facetious, and I know that deciding to stick to writing 3200 words per day this past mid-winter wasn’t the real reason for my novel writing shutdown for the past two months, but it didn’t help.

In the meantime, I worked on a self-help book. But before I started it, and while I was in between chapters of that book, whenever I tried to restart the fourth novel in my latest Christmas romance series, it just.

Wouldn’t.

Go.

Anywhere.

I had a similar trouble with the third book in the series, though I didn’t have in my head at the time to write more a day than my usual 2,000 words. So I was determined to write this final novel. If I could break through the demand avoidance with that one, I could do the same with this one.

I finished the self-help book, got a skeletal outline going for the romance novel… and threw the 3200 words per day idea out the window.

I’ve been steadily writing 2,000 words, and only 2,000 words, every day, even when I’ve felt like I could write more, for the over a week now. For the first time in a long time, writing fiction is fun. I’m not pressuring myself with a deadline. And, I have a lot of free time for chores, hobbies, and enjoying the outdoors.

I’m also finding that limiting my daily word count helps to keep the story momentum going. I don’t run out of steam.

Long story short? I believe pressuring myself with a high daily word count was causing novel writing burnout even though I was spacing the composition of said novels a good deal apart, as I’d promised I would do in this article. Why did I do it in the first place?, you might ask.

Because of having heard, over the past several years, other self-published fiction authors talk about how they whip out five thousand and more words per day. Without the help of AI, I might add.

I also might add that these authors usually don’t have any children, often are single, are younger than forty-five years old, and – here’s the clincher – if they don’t write that next book, they’ll have trouble paying the light bill.

I have no need to try to write a book a month. Or a book every two months. I write because the process fills a place in my soul, and makes me feel like I’m contributing something good to the world.

As long, that is, as I’m writing on my own terms, and not somebody else’s.

As I was reminded in an e-mail I received from Malory Ford, another Christian romance author, I need to run my own race, not somebody else’s.

Rediscovering A Childhood Love

 Most of the month of December, I did a huge total-house purge and reorganization, including furniture rearrangement and a bit of redecorating. As I shifted my creativity away from writing stories and toward the visual arts, a part of me that I buried somewhere deep in my soul after growing up wriggled its way out of the box I'd put it in.

I began to want to color again.

Before I say anything more, I must confess that I'm terrible at drawing people and animals. But when I was a child, I relished the mere creation of designs on paper. I enjoyed exploring with colors, and making something pretty.

I thought, as the nights grew longer and I became more disillusioned with the increasingly paltry offerings on YouTube, why not? The fact that we have loads of paper and two boxes of little-used crayons that would otherwise sit idle for years, only served to spur me on.

And so, a few times a week, in the evening, I sit down at the table with a piece of paper and the markers and crayons, and I draw and color. Here's what I created the other night:

Drawing and coloring make for a nice rest away from the mental effort required for writing stories.

Speaking of that, you might be interested to know that I am around a quarter of the way finished with my third novel in my latest series, which will top off at four novels. It's another Christmas romance series, so I won't be releasing it until October, but sometime this summer I'll post the first chapter of the first book in the series, just to give you a taste. Follow this blog so you don't miss it!

In the meantime, why not sit down with some paper and a box of crayons one evening? You might be surprised at how joyful and grounding the activity of creating a colorful picture can be. Rediscover the artist you once knew you were before somebody told you otherwise!

Many blessings to you,

Emily Josephine

I Think I Finally Get The Ridiculous Misunderstandings in Romance Novels

 

As a reader of clean romance, I have been continually frustrated with the misunderstandings that many romance authors create for their two main characters, the big misunderstanding that is meant to pull them apart.

Of course, some of these misunderstandings – many of them, perhaps – really and truly are ridiculous, arbitrarily pulled out of the air by an author desperate to create drama and lacking the skill or patience to think of how to do so in a way that won’t make the reader roll their eyes.

In other words, the misunderstanding is unrealistic from anyone’s point of view.

However, the other day I realized that perhaps an equal number of these misunderstandings make perfect sense… to neurotypical people.

I am not neurotypical. I am autistic. I want people to speak to me with directness, no beating around the bush or polite white lies. And if I had a friend whom I knew could potentially get deceived by a former colleague, I would tell that friend outright, even right in front of the colleague, if necessary. And I wouldn’t care one whit about hurting the former colleague’s feelings. If they were a jerk known for making new friends, then using them and wringing them out like old rags when they were through, I would warn my friend about it right in front of the person.

Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t anyone? Jerks and con artists should be called out on their jerkhood so that they can stop victimizing people.

The scene that started it all.

That’s why, in a recent novel that I read, I got ticked off at the male protagonist. David’s old boss, Martin, had shown up to some corporate ball. Martin was notorious for stealing women away from the men who loved them, using them, then tossing them away, causing heartbreak all around.

So when Martin made a comment, out of Ellie’s earshot, about her beauty, David made it sound like he and Ellie were just friends and co-workers, at the ball as part of their job. He knew that if he let Martin have an inkling about his real feelings for Ellie, Martin would go after her and end up hurting her.

At that point, Ellie didn’t know how David felt about her, either. She only knew that she’d fallen for him sometime ago.

What happened was, Ellie was returning from the restroom at the time and overheard David’s callous remark. Instead of rushing to explain what Martin was about, David remained polite and simply introduced them.

Of course, after Martin was out of earshot, David tried to explain to Ellie, but in her mind he was too late. She refused to let him speak. Understandably so.

My autistic brain doesn’t get that kind of cow poop. Why are we worried about hurting the feelings of someone who is not only not a friend, but also a living turd? Who made the rule that you had to be polite when someone’s life might be at stake?

Then, I realized: it's a brain thing.

However, as I’ve been learning about how the autistic brain works and thinks, I’ve come to realize that one of the major reasons that autistic people struggle to make and keep friends is that they think literally. White lies aren’t part of literal thinking, or literal speech. All the social niceties and games that neurotypicals play for the sake of keeping the peace are also beyond the scope of literal thinking. This is why neurotypical people tend to consider autistic people as rude.

Blunt honesty hurts their feelings. If someone’s feelings are hurt, then by default the person who spoke the truthful words must be rude.

Don’t get me wrong. I know some things are unkind and unloving to say, true though they may be. But even if we autistics judge a certain truth not to be unkind, we learn to keep our mouths shut. We put on neurotypical masks so that we can make and keep friends. We learn what neurotypical people consider to be insulting or offensive, and we refrain from speaking our mind.

And it’s stressful. Very stressful.

Many other autistics, like my middle sister, never mask and say exactly what’s on their mind. Ironically, until I started to be too tired to mask a few years ago – especially until I discovered that I’m autistic – I considered that sister to be tactless and rude.

Now I know the truth. She’s never been capable of playing the social niceties game.

Back to romance novels. I now understand that my frustrations with the kind of misunderstanding I illustrated above have come from my brain being autistic. From now on, I will read such misunderstandings with better understanding.

That is, I will understand that the author is writing from a neurotypical point of view.

I guess I’ll never set the pond on fire with my romance stories, because I can’t make my characters flat-out lie for the sake of protecting a jerk. For the sake of creating tension and drama.

Even though I get it, really, I don’t get it.

I Wrote Another Novel; Here’s How I’m Planning to Avoid Burnout in the Future

 In the blog post I wrote this past June, I confessed that I might be through with writing novels.

Well.

A few days ago, I completed the first book in a new Christian holiday romance series. The 65,000 words took me about five weeks to write. As usual, the task began to feel like pulling teeth after about 30,000 words. As usual, I plowed through.

But this time, I didn’t resent the time. This time, I didn’t end up utterly hating the story and never wanting to see so much as a single word from it again.

Why? There were two things different this time around.

I understood my brain.

This is the first novel I’ve written while having an understanding of my brain. Knowing that I have ADHD, when I got to the notorious “halfway point,” I realized that I didn’t really hate the story. Nor did I think that I’d missed my calling, that I was going against God’s will by writing novels.

Instead, I realized that my brain had gotten bored with the story and wanted to do something different. I kept working on the novel every day until I felt like I was going to explode with the need for something different. And then, I took a day off.

Just one day.

I listened to somebody else’s novel. I watched YouTube. I walked around outside with no other aim than to be in nature.

If I’d needed to, I would have taken more days off to play. As it happened, the next day, I was able to sit down and get back to it.

Lesson number one: I can continue writing novels as long as, when in the middle of writing one, I give my brain a break to do something different when it’s begging me to.

I understood the cause of my burnout.

Related to that is the second thing that was different this time around. Because I understand my brain better, I figured out why I had my worst novel-writing burnout late last year and early this year.

I didn’t give myself enough time between books.

And my last series was the longest one I’ve ever written – six books, as opposed to my standard four.

Previously, I drove myself to complete a four-book series within a six-month time frame. Or less. I thought a two-week break in between novels was long enough.

Nope.

And my “Christmas Sisters” series being six books long, I pushed myself over the edge with it.

And because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment, a couple of months later I pushed myself to write the next two books in the “Pine Mountain Estates” series.

There are other self-published authors who are this prolific, even more so, and can just keep going.

Obviously, they have neurotypical brains.

Either that, or they’re at high risk of being put into a psychiatric institution.

To prevent any level of novel-writing burnout ever again, I decided, before I began writing this last novel, to write only four novels per year. I decided, as well, that I would take a two-month break in between each novel.

I don’t know why it took learning that I have ADHD to figure this out, because I enjoy creating YouTube videos, as well. Why didn’t it ever occur to me to write one novel, then take some time off to create videos?

I enjoy YouTubing so much, in fact, that the more I think about it, the more the idea of becoming a full-time YouTuber appeals to me. But back when I was forcing myself to crank out a minimum of six novels per year, I simply didn’t have the time or creative energy to be both a novelist and a YouTuber. I blamed it on perimenopause, then menopause. I blamed it on aging. I blamed it on my Irlen Syndrome.

The truth was, I’d been working against my brain.

With a full eight weeks in between writing novels, I can create as many videos as I like… including enough videos to upload during the several weeks that I’m writing a novel. Likely as not, most of my future blog posts will consist of YouTube videos, plus any script I wrote for them.

Life is finally starting to feel fun. 😊

Lesson number two: I need to work with my brain, not against it.

Until next time, be blessed!

Will I Ever Write Another Novel?

 In my last post, the one where I revealed that I am autistic, I more than hinted that this discovery has impacted my “writing career,” and promised to tell you how and why.

So, here I go.

AuDHD, anyone?

Before I get into all that, I need to explain that in addition to symptoms of autism, I also display/experience enough symptoms of ADHD that if I wanted to, I could carry the label of AuDHD. It’s what the neurodivergent community has dubbed (with some affection, I think) those of us who are dual-diagnosed with autism and ADHD.

I don’t really care for the label, because it’s misleading. I don’t think taking an interest in many things displays “hyperactivity,” and my brain isn’t attention deficit. On the contrary, it tries to pay attention to too many things at once!

But those traits of needing novelty with some frequency, and having a brain that wants to go everywhere all at once, make writing a novel a huge challenge.

I enjoy writing stories, but…

While I’ve always enjoyed writing stories, I also enjoy sitting down and playing my guitar, singing, and writing non-fiction to teach what I’ve learned.

I enjoy gardening, wish I could find the time to buff up my Spanish and sign language while learning other languages, and love to learn about nature.

Oh, and over the years, I've probably started AT LEAST ten - yes, ten! - YouTube channels. Right now, I'm keeping my gardening channel updated and am going to start a channel where I talk about neurodiversity, both sharing my journey and helping neurodivergent families live in greater harmony. I'd recently started an inspirational channel and comedy channel, but think I'm going to ditch both for a while, if not forever. 

Is your brain spinning yet?

In other words, for the past ten years, sitting down and making myself write 1500-3000 words per day has been a kind of slow torture, because I haven’t had time to pursue all of my other interests. And because my brain insists on novelty, it wants me to complete any given project as quickly as possible, which means I’ve been focusing most of my time, energy, and attention on whatever story line I’ve been writing. That means that by the time I finish even a short novel, I’m so burned out that I don’t want to pursue my other interests. So I end up wasting time listening to other people’s novels and/or watching entertaining YouTube videos.

And then after a week or two of vegging out, I push myself to write the next novel because if you want to make money with self-publishing, you have to write series and you have to keep your fans happy.

Last fall, I got sick of the merry-go-round. I was completely burned out with writing novels. Completely sick of the whole self-publishing scene.

At the time, I didn’t know the root cause. Now, I do.

I haven’t been true to myself.

I cringed, writing that sentence. “Be true to yourself” has become a cliché that the world seems to have interpreted as, “Be as self-centered and selfish as you want, because you deserve it.” However, when I use the phrase here, I’m talking about my natural bent.

Part of my natural bent is not to spend thirty days and more on a writing project.

Without exception, with every novel I’ve ever written I’ve wanted to quit at around twenty thousand words. A story is fun up until then, and at that point, I’m ready to move on to something else. Why? It’s the way my brain is wired. I crave novelty, changing things up with some frequency.

I’ve tried writing novellas and short stories, but somehow, the stories in my head are always a lot longer. I want to put in a lot more detail than those styles allow. And some would say that it’s a lot harder to write a good short story than to write a good novel.

Why not write more words a day and be able to finish a novel within a couple of weeks? Besides the thing about wanting to be able to a variety of things during the day, I have Irlen Syndrome, otherwise known as Visual Processing Disorder. Just writing 500 words at one time makes me tired; writing more at one time puts me at risk of straining my eyes, especially if I do it multiple times a day.

I can, to a large extent, write without looking, but even if I don’t end up with a ton of mistakes to fix (as task which DOES require looking, no way around it), the fact remains that for every half hour I spend working on a story, it’s a half hour I could spend working on one of my other hobbies or interests.

And when I ignore those other interests, novel-writing burnout happens more quickly. So I might as well have written less over a longer period of time.

Which I hate doing, because I get tired of the story when I do that.

Anyone seeing a catch-22 here?

Then there’s the autistic side of me.

I’ve tried really hard over the years to create what I used to call “normal” characters. Now I realize that they are characters I was trying to put into a neurotypical mold. In other words, I was trying to create people that I simply can’t understand. Women who care about makeup and fashion and babies; men who ooze confidence and boldness, and who can have a long-lasting conversation.

Want to know where I got the idea for Allison Whitlock of my “Pine Mountain Estates” series? She’s the woman I’ve always envied: calm and in control, even in the face of trauma and tragedy. Nurturing. Compassionate toward strangers. Hospitable.

Though I like her character, my favorite characters by far are those I’ve modeled, unknowingly, after people with neurodivergent brains.

Sheila Carson and Hank Johnson of The Envelope.

Michelle Dennis and Daniel West of Snuggling With The Christmas Chef.

Tiger O’Keefe in Talia’s Tiger.

Erin Halley in His First Choice.

Rachel Polowsky in Worth the Risk.

Tommy Ward in Pine Mountain Dreams.

But most women don’t relate to women who hate wearing makeup and shopping, and who’d rather spend a weekend researching some science topic than going out with “the girls,” so I’ve tried to write neurotypical characters as much as I could get myself to.

And it’s been really, really hard. And…they end up being the characters I find boring and mundane. In fact, my three least favorite books, the first in “Choices and Chances” and “Christmas Sisters,” and the second in “Rock Star Husbands,” are my least favorite, I recently realized, because both the main characters are neurotypical. By the reviews, readers disagree with me. But most of my readers are neurotypical, so they easily relate to those characters which I struggle to create.

Then there’s the marketing side of self-publishing. As an autistic person, I find maintaining and communicating to an e-mail list intimidating, some days downright frightening.

The reason is two-fold: first, I hate doing anything social, and e-mailing a bunch of people at a time feels social. Second, as is the case with many neurodivergent people, I am extremely sensitive to rejection. Every single time I’ve sent an e-mail to my subscribers, I’ve been afraid that someone would e-mail me back a scathing criticism.

Having received a comment on my blog like the one I share here has made me even more skittish.

The autistic side of me also cares more about learning and teaching than about writing fantasies (which any story with a happy ending is, really; life rarely ties up all loose ends with a neat bow, and in a way that satisfies everyone).

Will I ever write another novel?

That all brings us back to the original question. The answer is…

…I. Don’t. Know.

When I wrote this post about where I wanted to take my writing business, I was already questioning whether I truly wanted to continue writing novels. Not too long before that, I'd been genuinely enthusiastic about putting my Christian thriller and fantasy story ideas onto the proverbial paper. And I had committed to myself to write two more novels in the “Pine Mountain Estates” series to bring it to a close, and bring the total number of books in the series up to nine.

But now, I don’t know. In the past, I’ve written more than one blog post in which I declared I was done writing novels. Eventually, the story bug came back to bite me, and I returned to writing. So, it could be I’m simply in the biggest burn-out phase of my writing career.

It could simply be I can’t handle the stress of maintaining a large summer garden AND writing novels at the same time, and by fall I’ll feel like diving back into them again.

Or, it could be that my dream of making a living by writing novels has been misdirected.  Making videos is a lot less stressful, and I love using my gift of acting on my comedy channel, as well as my gift of teaching and desire to encourage on the other channels. I love having more time during the day to do whatever, instead of being chained to writing and editing.

Most of all, I love not having to worry that I’m a few minutes away from a severe eye strain. I love not being tired all day because I spent most of the morning writing.

Will I ever write another novel? At the moment, my mind says, “No.” But I’m not God. I don’t know what even the near future holds.

One thing I DO know: I love to write. Therefore, while I’m not writing novels, I’m going to be writing a whole lot more blog posts.

About whatever I want to write about. Autism. Homeschooling. Women’s health beyond fifty. Gardening. Maybe even self-publishing.

You have been updated. Sorry and you’re welcome.

The Most Shocking Self-Discovery Of My Life

 Six weeks ago, at the tender age of 53, I found out that I’m autistic.

It’s been, at once, the biggest shock of my life, and a huge relief. A shock, because like most people – especially those of my generation – I had believed that autism looked a certain way. 

It looked like a mute four-year-old, sitting on the floor and staring at spinning plates all day.

It looked, of course, like Dustin Hoffman’s character in the blockbuster movie, Rain Man.

It looked like my middle sister and my brother, who are also both autistic. Though neither knows it, they clearly fit what I’ve read about it. And my mom and youngest sister figured out, separately, about their issues, as well.

The relief piece I’ll talk about toward the end.

What got me started.

For some reason – maybe I’d watched a video about ADHD (I’d pegged my son as having that when he was nine; more about that later) – about two months ago YouTube recommended a video to me with the title, “16 Overlooked Autistic Traits In Females.” Here it is, if you’re curious.

The Holy Spirit must have led me to it, because I felt drawn to watch it. As I did, my mouth fell open wider and wider, as I related to one trait after another. Not all of them, but most.

It was enough for me to go to the links to the online autism tests that the YouTuber had placed in the description below the video. The links were to the website, Embrace Autism, which licensed psychotherapist Dr. Natalie Engelbrecht set up six years ago after being diagnosed with autism at age 47. On the site, she provides, for free, a range of tests. Taken as a whole, they can help you with a strong measure of certainty decide whether or not you have autism, as well some of the various issues related to it.

“I can’t be autistic!”

On one of the tests I scored two points under the threshold for “there’s a strong chance you’re autistic.” So, of course, I couldn’t be autistic. Especially when the other test showed that I have about equal autistic and neurotypical traits.

That actually didn’t surprise me, because eight years ago when I was trying to figure out what my son’s issues were, I read the official criteria for autism and saw myself in a lot of them. Maybe even most of them, but I didn’t think I fit because I’d lived an independent life without a lot of problems.

Even though I’ve always struggled to make and keep friends. Even though I’ve always preferred to be alone, working on my latest obsession. Even though I’ve always rocked to calm myself. Even though I can’t have a conversation with somebody without going on and on about my strong opinion or interest until I’m sure they think I’m the rudest, most self-centered person on earth.

After taking the initial passes through those two tests, I started paying attention to myself. To my thoughts. And my behaviors.

I started remembering events from my childhood.

A few days later, realizing that I had answered some of the questions incorrectly, I retook both the tests in question. On the first, where I’d initially scored two points below the threshold for autism, I then scored eleven points above it. On the second, I scored as leaning more heavily toward autism than neurotypical (I subsequently discovered that people who receive formal diagnoses of autism not infrequently score as “mixed autistic and neurotypical traits” on that particular test).

I started taking the other assessments on that website. Started reading the prefaces to the tests, as well as some of the comments, in order to better inform myself of how to interpret certain questions. The very first time I took the RAADS-R, only a couple of days after taking the first two tests, I scored 133.

In studies, no neurotypical person has ever scored above 64 on that test.

In subsequent attempts, even when I was trying NOT to look autistic, I scored even higher.

I took a few of the other tests more than once, as well, because I just couldn’t believe that I was autistic.

On every single test, I continued to score well above the threshold for autism. Sometimes, I scored higher than the average autistic female scores.

And then, there was the eye test.

I was more than two weeks into this shocking journey of self-discovery when I took the Reading the Mind In The Eyes Test. This is a test where you look at photos taken only of various people’s eyes, wearing various expressions, and you select from four options which emotion they’re feeling. Dr. Natalie notes on that test page that neurotypical people ALWAYS finish the test in under two minutes and get most of the answers correct because they intuitively, and therefore instantly, know what the eyes are expressing.

Let me park here for a minute.

I never, in my entire 53 years, ever had any idea that most people could look at someone’s eyes and instantly know what they were feeling. I thought everybody else did what I did, learned by experience what various facial expressions meant, and combined it with things like tone of voice and body language on order to Sherlock Holmes their way into interpreting someone else’s emotions of the moment.

Dr. Natalie goes on to say that, when asked how they derived at an answer, autistics say that they merely guessed or that they had learned to interpret various appearances of the eye and the skin around it. In any case, autistic people always, always, take longer than two minutes to finish the test.

I got only four out of the thirty-six items wrong, but I completely guessed on at least half of them and the rest I analyzed based on prior knowledge.

And, it took me around four minutes to complete.

I had a pretty long God-why-do-you-hate-me-why-did-you-make-me-like-this moment. As in, it lasted for a couple of days. Seeing my results for the RMET was the first time since I’d begun taking and retaking the tests on that website that I felt like something was wrong with me, that something was broken, and I was upset.

At the same time, it explained a couple of things. First, it explained my lifelong difficulty in relating to most other people. For instance, why kids found it so easy to bully me when I was in school (autistic children who are forced to attend school are often, if not always, bullied), and why it took me so long to learn to “read” people (I still often get it wrong).

The second thing it explained was how autism can be a huge disability, depending on the extent of disconnect in the social part of the brain. I’d been led to believe that the main problem with autism had to do with the hypersensitivities, but after taking RMET, I knew better.

The last hurdle.

During the past few years, I’ve watched two videos of women who are autistic. Both said that they think in pictures. So I got it into my head that all autistic people are right-brained dominant who therefore think in pictures (my son is like that).

So, like the good autistic person that I am (autistic people are famous for diving deep into research on whatever is fascinating them at the moment), I got online and did a search on how autistic people think.

Lo and behold, not all autistic people are right-brained and think exclusively in pictures. Many are like me and think in words, and have a gift for language – including learning foreign ones.

I am now embracing autism.

No, I’m not going for a professional diagnosis. It takes weeks and thousands of dollars; besides, the tests on Dr. Natalie’s website, taken as a whole, reveal a more accurate picture of the type of brain a person has than going to see a psychiatrist who’s still convinced that “Rain Man” is the epitome of a high-functioning autistic (he was actually pretty low-functioning, if you pay close attention to the movie and check out the folks on YouTube who have been formally diagnosed as adults).

Though there are some formally diagnosed autistics who take issue with self-diagnosis, it’s not an illegitimate way to ascertain whether or not you’re neurodivergent. Especially not for those of us with high I.Q.s who dig deep and take every assessment out there multiple times, watch videos to learn how to interpret the DSM-V criteria for autism, and basically try to convince ourselves that we can’t be autistic until the mountain of evidence has piled too high to deny it any further.

Which is what happened to me.

Then there’s the fact that, months before I thought I could possibly have a neurodivergent brain, I began to suspect my son is autistic. He easily fulfills the DSM-V criteria for the condition. What about the ADHD? I’ve come to believe that both diagnoses are related. Same street, different house numbers.

My point? My son had to have gotten the genes from somewhere. (And I’m not the only parent who passed on the genes of a neurodiverse brain to him, but my husband doesn’t care to pursue the issue as I have.)

I’m relieved to know that I’m not weird (as I’ve always believed), that there are many other people out there who have a brain similar to mine. I’m relieved that there’s a reason for the low-level anxiety I’ve suffered from since my teens, perhaps even earlier. I’m relieved to know that it’s okay to rock back and forth, or sway on my feet, or cuddle with a stuffed animal, or run my fingers through my hair, in order to keep my emotions regulated and assist my brain in processing information.

I’m embracing autism. And as I do, I want to inform my fans that yes, this revelation is going to have an impact on my novel-writing career. But this post is already long enough; I’ll address that topic soon.

Oh, and...here it is! 😉